Cancer 2
Posted on February 1, 2023 1 Comment
The NHS is doing a good job so far. I went to see the GP just before Christmas, who after an appropriate examination (not really my thing but I did find out that I don’t have a prostate problem) sent me for a sigmoidoscopy (for those not in the know it is a tube with a camera and various implements for snipping off lumps for biopsy, needles for tattooing and so on. A wonderful yet rather unpleasant invention. As we were just about to head off for Provence for three weeks the procedure was arranged for the New Year. I had the test last Tuesday, which indicated a 7cm growth 31cm up in my colon. The live visuals were mostly fascinating, including the colourful item that turned out to be the tumour. At least I have seen my own living cancer. I was immediately recommended for a CT scan, which I had on Saturday evening. I am now waiting for the results.
My experience so far with the NHS has been almost entirely positive. The people who have dealt with me have been kind and caring, yet practical and skilled. Obtaining this kind of diagnosis is not pleasant, nor are the procedures for obtaining the diagnosis. The nurses acknowledged my fears and dealt with them in a caring way. I was more frightened of the procedure than the potential outcome. I am officially less frightened of driving through a minefield than having something stuck up my backside. At least minefields are exciting.
The only problem I have experienced is the inability of people to tell me in a straightforward manner what they have found. After the sigmoidoscopy the two people who carried it out said – twice – that they would like to phone my wife so she could come along to the discussion about what they have found. That gave me a clue. Then, at the subsequent discussion (no, they didn’t get to phone the wife), instead of telling me what they suspected the problem was they asked me if I had thought about what the possible outcomes might be. I said that I had, and waited for them to employ that word. No chance, it was left to me to suggest that they had found a tumour, for me to mention the word cancer. They finally acknowledged it, and the look on their faces suggested they thought I was going to break down in tears and smash up the room, which I didn’t. It wasn’t until they left (quickly!) that I was given the letter that suggested a 7cm malignant tumour, so I was unable to ask for more details.
I understand that they were trying to be caring, to let me know gently, but that is not possible. In the end there is a single transition point. At one moment you do not know you have cancer, at the next moment you do. There is no breaking it gently. That transition from not knowing to knowing is fundamental. It is a life changer. It cannot be said gently.
I don’t like people faffing around with the truth. Just say what you mean and then I can deal with the consequences. Stress arises from ignorance.
To be continued, hopefully.
Cancer
Posted on January 30, 2023 2 Comments
This is rather an awkward subject for many people, presumably because it is about life and death and many people have an awkwardness about death. I have just found out that I have bowel cancer. I have had the tests and now I am waiting for the results to see whether it has spread and if so, how far. It is an odd feeling, knowing that there is a malignant growth inside you. I have a (dis)advantage in that I have seen it. The camera showed it attached to my colon very clearly. It is 7cm long, and that is about all I know at the moment. I have had biopsies and a CT scan and I am waiting for an appointment with the consultant.
I don’t know whether this is going to kill me, and if it does whether it will do it quickly or slowly. I might live for three months, I might live for 30 years, but just knowing that I have cancer means that I am at present confronted with death. On the positive side my main thoughts are so be it. I am not afraid of death. Why should I be? I agree with Bertrand Russell and others that my ego is a temporary phenomenon that appeared when I was born and will disappear when I die. The best we can hope for is to have some self-constructed meaning in that short time we are alive. The individual is the only one who can give meaning to life. In Sartre’s terms authenticity, or from being to becoming.
We are not remembered for long. Once you die everyone gets on with their lives. They might think of you occasionally, they might experience sadness, but in the end their life is more important, along with the lives of their family and friends. A very few people are remembered for what they did. People such as Hitler, Pol Pot, Churchill, George Orwell, Edward I, Florence Nightingale, Charlemagne, Orville Wright, Alan Turing, Napoleon, Piers Gaveston, Cleopatra, Oscar Wilde or William Gladstone, but they are not remembered for who they are but for what they did. It is a tenuous link between the famous person remembered and the actual person known to friends and family.
I really do not mind dying. I am pleased that at the first threat of death I didn’t give up on a lifetime of beliefs and start praying to a ridiculous non-existent bearded fairy who lives on a cloud. The culture of religion and belief is strong. It is not surprising because people want the world to mean something. Unfortunately it doesn’t mean anything. The universe has no beginning that we understand, it has no end that we understand. The only true beginnings and ends for our egos are birth and death. The only meaning is the meaning we place on life. Placing a religious meaning on life is inauthentic. It means taking other people’s ideas (which are usually about the subjugation of the masses) and internalising them as your own. That is essentially inauthentic. It demonstrates a person who has not thought about what their life means.
Am I authentic? I like to think I am but I don’t really know. I tend to behave consistently in certain ways (including being inconsistent), often to the annoyance of others, but hopefully mainly positively, eg challenging the way people unthinkingly think. I hope that in my career I have helped a bit, done a bit of good. I have been closely involved in the education of many people from all around the world. I hope some of them at least have become slightly better (whatever that means) in some way because of my influence. I hope that overall my influence on and interactions with friends and family have been positive. I hope I have made their lives a little better. I have written a few books and a lot of academic articles. In some ways these are a more permanent contribution but do they really mean anything? It is the same as my other interactions. I hope they have helped some people in some ways.
In the end it is not for me or for anyone else to judge my contribution. I have done what I have done and that’s it. I have broken moral codes but I have generally lived by what I hope is a fairly reasonable moral code. I am imperfect, ok very imperfect, but aren’t we all? With free will we are bound to make the wrong choices at times. That makes trying to be authentic in life all the more important, because authenticity is not just about the self it is about the way we are with others.
Of course, this experience of the potential for fairly immediate death may be somewhat premature, then I might look a bit daft talking like this. I hope I do get a bit longer because I still have things to do, particularly post-retirement (write books, read books, go to places, talk with people); but if it isn’t that’s fine.
My other thought is that the usual perception is that family and friends should be supportive of the person who is dying. Sometimes it is the dying person (I am not saying I am dying but you know what I mean) who does a lot of the supporting. ‘It is ok, I am fine about dying, it doesn’t worry me.’
To be continued – probably.
Ukraine: What the media doesn’t tell us, Part Two
Posted on March 8, 2022 Leave a Comment
Last time I looked at some of the background issues regarding Ukraine and the current war. Now I would like to look at the military situation, which is very difficult as no one seems to know what is happening, and few people are even reporting the military situation beyond a few bland statements. Much of what is happening must be guesswork, and reliant on what we know about the military strengths and weaknesses of the two sides, and the (very) limited reporting from the front lines. The media focuses more on the (important) human stories of misery to the exclusion of informing us about the military situation. This is in contrast to Western reporting of other wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and so on, where journalists are working closely with, and often embedded with, the military.
Most of what we hear about the Ukrainian and Russian military situation on the BBC and in the newspapers is based on what the Ukrainians are saying, which is inevitably biased and probably largely wrong. If we believe Western media then we should think that the Ukrainian forces are holding their own against the Russians, that their equipment is equal to the Russians’ and that they are inflicting more harm on the Russians than the Russians are inflicting on them. The truth is unknown, but the Russians are advancing, and there are a number of things we should consider, for example armour and air forces.
Before the war started the Ukrainian air force had around 225 aircraft. Of these, fewer than 100 are combat aircraft, mainly Mig-29s and Su-27s with a few Su-24s and Su-25s. These aircraft are not far from obsolete. Actually compared to some of the Russian planes they are obsolete. The better ones, the Mig-29s (which Poland is purportedly going to provide more of to the Ukrainians if they can find a way of getting them across the border without getting drawn into the war) and the Su-27s were introduced in the 1980s. They are Soviet aircraft. They have been upgraded but they are no match for the Su-35s of the Russian air force.
Since the 1930s, ground invasions have usually been preceded by air bombardment, often lasting several hours or days, designed to reduce the defences of the attacked country. This did not happen in the current war. We don’t know why, though it was perhaps thought that the Ukrainian forces would collapse quickly and the Russians wanted limited destruction so they could quickly rebuild the country. Nevertheless, there have been air battles, though these are rarely reported in the Western media, presumably because it is usually the Ukrainians that have lost planes. We saw a video of a presumably Russian helicopter shot down, and a Ukrainian pilot reputedly shot down 6 planes in one day, though this is likely to be a myth. What most media outlets did not tell us was that Russian planes (presumably) shot down four Ukrainian Su-27s in one day, while ground-based missiles shot down an Su-25, a drone and a helicopter on the same day. Military Watch magazine has a picture of several Ukrainian Mig-29s shot up while on the ground somewhere in Ukraine.
It appears that though Western media generally does not report significant Ukrainian losses, the Ukrainian air force has possibly been largely destroyed or has to confine itself to Western Ukraine. The best hope for the Ukrainians is having a good supply of Stinger ground-to-air missiles, which are highly effective at bringing down aircraft.
Turning to armour, the Ukrainian army has the largest European tank force outside Russia, perhaps 850 tanks. This substantial force should be able to meet most threats. Unfortunately most of it (around 90%) consists of outdated Soviet vehicles, particularly the T-64B, which was introduced in the 1970s. While some have been upgraded, they are no match for Russian armour. The T-72B3 and the T-90M are better armoured, have more modern firepower (rounds and ranges), and have a greater operational range.
The Russians have not yet, apparently, deployed their best tank, the T-14, which is superior to any other tank in the world, with a greater range, a gun which can accurately fire 12km, very strong armour to protect the crew – and it probably not worth employing in Ukraine given the superiority of the Russians’ other tanks.
The best hope for the Ukrainians regarding stopping Russian armour is probably hand-held anti-tank weapons that are being shipped to Ukraine from the West. Another example of asymmetrical warfare which endangers the operator.
The most significant problem the Russians might face, and we do not know the details here, may be logistical. Do they have enough fuel for their armoured columns, their resupply trucks, their aeroplanes? Do they have sufficient spare parts? How is resupply affected by the sanctions?
It remains to be seen whether the Russians can succeed in their war aims using their current approach, or whether they will need to employ their superior weaponry in greater numbers. Presumably they do not want to destroy the infrastructure of Ukraine any more than is necessary, but given the will of the Ukrainians, the desire to fight and kill the Russians, they may have bitten off more than they can chew, particularly if the West can continue to resupply the Ukrainians without being drawn into a wider war.
We should not think that the Russians are bogged down, that their advances are not going to plan. Ukraine is a big country, and it is likely to take a long time to subdue. And even if the Russians do succeed in taking over the country will it be safe for them to walk the streets at night?
Some of the above is speculation, some is known, but I would like to see more journalists in this war doing their job, which involves reporting what is happening as objectively as possible, and then conducting analysis in the same way.
Ukraine: What the media doesn’t tell us, Part One
Posted on March 8, 2022 Leave a Comment
It is difficult to find out exactly what is going on in a war, any war. The press from each side is usually biased, it is difficult for journalists to get to battle sites, there is a genuine element that people do not know what is going on, and there is of course military secrecy, where one side cannot afford to let the other side know what is happening.
This has to be acceptable. It is war, not a game of tennis. Even in these days of social media we cannot expect to understand what is happening on the ground. That is a job for historians and retired generals in the years to come. What is not acceptable is deliberate bias on the part of media groups that claim to be impartial. In the West we expect Russia Today to be biased towards the Russian perspective, but the BBC should not express the same – or more extreme – bias towards the Ukrainian perspective.
I have to add, otherwise I am open to being slated by all and sundry, that right is on the side of Ukraine, that Russia should not have invaded, and that problems should be resolved through talking, not shooting. Nevertheless, when I switch on the TV or the radio, or read a newspaper or news website, I expect to be provided with information from all sides. In the West everything is from the Ukrainian perspective, nothing about why the Russians invaded, and as much as we don’t like to think about it they did have their reasons for invading. Perhaps the main one was security fears. If Ukraine joined NATO then Russia would be threatened in its soft underbelly. Russia sees Ukraine as being within its sphere of influence, which is not surprising given that many Ukrainians (at least until 24 Feb) also thought they were Russian, or at least closely related to Russia. They go back a long way, at least to Kievan Rus over a thousand years ago, and Ukraine has been part of the same political group (country, nation, empire) for most of the period since then, excepting the influence of Mongols, Poles, Lithuanians and others over the centuries. It is only from the 20th Century that there has been independence for Ukraine, and then only for short periods until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The idea of Ukraine as a national entity only goes back to the 19th Century, with the influence of people like Mykhailo Drahomonov, who created a Ukrainian socialist organisation, and who influenced a generation of young leftwing Ukrainians who founded the Ruthenian Ukrainian Radical Party in 1890. It was founded in Lviv (Lemberg) which was of course in the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time – rather than the Russian empire.
Ukraine attempted to achieve nationhood in the wake of the collapse of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires in 1917-18. It was briefly independent before becoming part of the Soviet Union in 1922. When working in Finland I daily passed the old Ukrainian Embassy building in Helsinki.
The other problem with Ukrainian nationhood is its geographical location. Much of the western part of the country was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then in Poland, with parts in Romania, etc. The borders only settled down after World War Two, and even then it changed when Crimea was given to Ukraine in 1954 by Khrushchev. As for the people, many consider themselves Russian or nearly Russian, and many speak Russian as a first language. As is the case for many new nations, Ukraine encouraged the use of Ukrainian rather than Russian despite the wishes of many of its people.
Then we have Putin. OK, I get the need for security, the need to keep Ukraine out of NATO. From the Russian perspective I agree with it. If I was Russian I would probably have been very worried over the last couple of decades as NATO, the old enemy, has expanded across Europe, taking in the old Warsaw Pact countries and several of the new post-USSR countries. Ukraine and Belarus are the only buffers. Unfortunately, by invading Ukraine Putin has effectively created a unified Ukrainian nation, something that did not exist before. Now he is in trouble. He might win the war, he should win the war, but it is unlikely that he will win the peace. Indeed, it is debatable whether he will survive as Russian leader after this disaster. He probably expected many Ukrainians to welcome his troops with open arms (a little like many Ukrainians welcomed the Germans in 1941 – but that is another story), and he probably did not expect the West to show such unity against his actions.
Why has the West been unified? Two reasons stand out, one political, one human nature. Politically, Ukraine has been moving towards the EU and towards NATO membership, so the leaders of the West are upset that Putin is trying to regain control of Ukraine. In terms of human nature people have watched other people just like them, ie other Europeans, white Europeans, suffering, and they empathise – far more than they empathise with non-European people.
Next time. All we hear and see is the tragedy, the human suffering. The media generally ignores the military situation, or when it does talk about it, it just relies on unreliable Ukrainian reports.
Student Assessment
Posted on January 19, 2022 Leave a Comment
As an academic, one of the most important tasks I do is to mark students’ work. In terms of job satisfaction the task varies from those rare occasions when a student produces some superlative work to the usual drudgery of working through seemingly endless essays or exam scripts, each one a poor copy of the one before, and a sad representation of what is to come, especially if they are all answering the same questions. Some of the work is very good, some (not too many) dreadful, but much is – to be honest – just mediocre, neither good nor bad, but sufficiently competent to get a mid-range mark. Marking periods are just that, periods, preceded by pre-marking tension (PMT), and consisting of mood swings and the need for quantities of alcohol (which is difficult as I have given up drinking).
The main exception is usually when marking projects, where a lot of genuinely independent work has gone into solving a problem through scientific endeavour.
In the past marking consisted of big piles of paper, which gradually shifted from one side of the desk to the other, with various scribbles added, and ring stains of endless tea. Now it consists of long days of staring at a computer screen, trying to determine whether what is in front of you is a masterpiece or an essay bought from the large number of cheating sites that are available, where a student can purchase, for a reasonable sum, an essay written specially for the purpose, the standard varying according to cost, usually written by impecunious PhD students who have blurred lines about what is right and wrong and an empty food cupboard. I have no idea how common such cheating is, but for me it is a good reason to go back to exams, rather than coursework. More difficult to cheat at, but worse to mark because of the handwriting.
I did catch someone cheating in an exam once. I was walkingup and down the aisles and saw a student with a piece of paper covering whole pages of notes. I wanted to pick her up by her ear, yell at her and throw her outside, but in the modern world I took the cheat sheet and exam materials away, and led her out of the room, telling her that there would be trouble for cheating. Unfortunately people who cheat in this way rarely get thrown out, just given 0% and another chance. It would be better to birch them in public to discourage the others.
When marking was carried out on paper the world was a much easier place. Put a few comments (information for the student if if it is coursework or a second examiner for guidance), add a mark and you are done. Compile the marks at the end and hand them to an admistrator who will magically prepare them for the exam board. Now, with the advent of computer marking, the world should be an easier place because computers make the world easier don’t they? They don’t. Some reasons for marking now being harder because of computers:
- It is more difficult to read and flip backwards and forwards through an essay online than as a few sheets of paper
- It is fiddly to put comments on the script
- It is impossible to strike a big red line through something that annoys you
- While the marks should – you would think – automatically be entered into a system that produces a report for the exam board, it doesn’t. Often one has to rewrite the marks into some other system, eg Excel, and send that in to the administrator (who often doesn’t exist in the same way any more, but that is another story).
- Staring at a screen for hours, reading thousands and thousands of words is just not good for you
- etc, add your own, there is a limit to the length of a blog.
Second marking is a little controversial. It is, in principle, a good idea. Two people looking at a piece of work, coming up with independent marks and then coming to some agreement has to be a good thing. Or not. The problem with marking is that there is huge variation between markers. It is intrinsically subjective, no matter how much experience the marker has. There is ample evidence that markers vary, particularly at the extremes. Where one marker sees genius and awards a first class mark, another marker sees rubbish, and awards a low mark. Agreeing a compromise mark, sorry an objective mark, is all very well but there are power and other issues involved. A more senior academic is likely to get their view even though a PhD student doing the marking has perhaps been more conscientious. We also audit mark. This consists of one person marking properly and a second person looking at a sample of the scripts and going, ‘Yeah, OK, that’s fine’. Marking is subjective, we just hope it all comes out in the wash. Students have so many assessments that the final average should be just about right, we hope.
How do we deal with this? The solution, according to many people (who may or may not be employable in other industries) is to spend time on aims and learning outcomes. The aims of a module are something to do with what the module is meant to be about. The learning outcomes are what we hope the student is going to learn, and what we plan to assess. We then provide marking guidelines. These work at two levels, a) generally what we mean by A, B, C and fail; b) information about the content that should be included in the essay.
These are easy to deal with. The second one first. In my view, any academic who tells students what they expect to see in an essay is not really an academic. It is the student’s job to work out what to include and how, though the modern academic world is full of students being told to include this and that, but not the other. If a student asks me what should be in an assessment I just say I don’t know, because I don’t. I want the student to inspire me, teach me, inform me, educate me, not bore me stupid with rote answers that could be provided by a chimpanzee with an intellectual deficit.
The first one second. With marks, A means excellent, B means very good but a little flawed or lacking in spark, C means competent but mediocre (see above; remember, mediocre is not necessarily bad, just, well, mediocre). That makes sense, but in the modern world we are told to write long accounts of exactly what we mean by excellent, etc in our marking guidelines so that students can read them and somehow be helped, and markers can read them and somehow be helped. That is just bollocks or, thinking about it,if we already know that A means excellent how can we add anything to this? ‘The introduction needs to be excellent, the conclusion nees to be excellent’, etc. Just saying excellent means excellent is a pointless tautology, no matter how many words you attach to excellent.
There is also an argument about the amount of feedback we provide, from the odd tick and a mark through to the marker writing an essay about the essay. The general rule seems to be provide more feedback, and then provide even more. There are two useful forms of feedback. The best one, and the most important, is the mark. If you get 75% you know you have done very well, that your work is excellent. If you get 35% you know you have failed, which is bad. The other useful form of feedback is having a detailed discussion one on one between the student and marker and discussing the issues that arise from the essay. This can only happen if the marker has not provided guidelines which indicate what should and should not be in the essay, because in effect that is the marker’s essay and they are only marking how well their own work has been presented. It only works when the student has come up with an interesting answer that is a heuristic for further discussion. Most of the actual feedback we give (‘good point’, ‘needs clarifying’, ‘yes’, ‘need reference’, etc) is of little value. These are the things students should be able to understand themselves.
Some psychological research back in the 1970s explored the notion of experts and novices. It was argued, quite successfully I believe, that there are fundamental differences between novices, who have to express everything explicitly (remember learning to drive?) and experts, for whom knowledge and skills are implicit. If we take this to be true then as expert markers how can we create explicit marking guidelines if the skills of marking are implicit (which they are)?
The best way to move from the explicit to the implicit stage of marking, ie to become an expert, is to do the marking, and initially to share it with someone who has been marking for years. That is the best training. Oh yes, and when I started at a certain university I was advised to start your comments to the student with a positive remark (yes, it is possible to do this, ‘well done, you handed something in’), then explain why the work is crap/good, and then finish with another positive remark (‘You spelt your name right’). The classic sandwich.
While I could go on about this subject a long time, I have just one more point, perhaps the most important one, which I may come back to another time. Over the several decades I have been in academia standards have changed – dramatically, and for the worse. At the extreme an essay that might have got 58% in the past is now getting 72%, from 2.2 to 1st class. Certainly the standards have moved at least a full class. This is in some ways inevitable for two reasons, mass higher education which means that to ensure most people pass we have to lower standards because many of the people at university are now from the lower intellectual orders, basically the cohorts are not as bright as they were. Second, we have a customer focus. Students are not students any more, they are customers and they expect good marks. I will deal with this in detail in another blog.
In conclusion, marking can be exciting, but it is – let’s be honest – usually a chore. It is one of the less enjoyable parts of our job. I know students who have spent hours poring over their work may be disappointed by this but sorry, that is the way it is. Project work is usually the main exception. This blog is not meant as a whinge. As someone who has done a proper job, being an academic – including the marking – is still not real work, more of a lifestyle choice.
Dr Nigel Hunt 